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examples

1

To use unzip to extract all members of the archive
letters.zip into the current directory and subdirectories
below it, creating any subdirectories as necessary:

unzip letters

To extract all members of letters.zip into the current
directory only:

unzip -j letters

To test letters.zip, printing only a summary message
indicating whether the archive is OK or not:

unzip -tq letters

To test all zipfiles in the current directory, printing
only the summaries:

unzip -tq \*.zip

(The backslash before the asterisk is only required if the shell
expands wildcards, as in Unix; double quotes could have been used
instead, as in the source examples below.) To extract
to standard output all members of letters.zip whose names
end in .tex, auto-converting to the local end-of-line
convention and piping the output into more(1):

unzip -ca letters \*.tex | more

To extract the binary file paper1.dvi to standard output
and pipe it to a printing program:

unzip -p articles paper1.dvi | dvips

To extract all FORTRAN and C source files--*.f, *.c, *.h, and
Makefile--into the /tmp directory:

unzip source.zip "*.[fch]" Makefile -d /tmp

(the double quotes are necessary only in Unix and only if
globbing is turned on). To extract all FORTRAN and C source
files, regardless of case (e.g., both *.c and *.C, and any
makefile, Makefile, MAKEFILE or similar):

unzip -C source.zip "*.[fch]" makefile -d /tmp

To extract any such files but convert any uppercase MS-DOS or VMS
names to lowercase and convert the line-endings of all of the
files to the local standard (without respect to any files that
might be marked ’’binary’’):

unzip -aaCL source.zip "*.[fch]" makefile -d /tmp

To extract only newer versions of the files already in the
current directory, without querying (NOTE: be careful of
unzipping in one timezone a zipfile created in another--ZIP
archives other than those created by Zip 2.1 or later contain no
timezone information, and a ’’newer’’
file from an eastern timezone may, in fact, be older):

unzip -fo sources

To extract newer versions of the files already in the current
directory and to create any files not already there (same caveat
as previous example):

unzip -uo sources

To display a diagnostic screen showing which unzip and
zipinfo options are stored in environment variables,
whether decryption support was compiled in, the compiler with
which unzip was compiled, etc.:

unzip -v

In the last five examples, assume that UNZIP or UNZIP_OPTS is set
to -q. To do a singly quiet listing:

unzip -l file.zip

To do a doubly quiet listing:

unzip -ql file.zip

(Note that the ’’.zip’’ is
generally not necessary.) To do a standard listing:

How do I unzip a tar gz archive to a specific destination?

Unzip returns "Unsupported compression method 14"

These files were compressed using the LZMA algorithm (possibly
using WinZip). LZMA archives are not supported by the
unzip command. I found that I could extract these
files using 7z instead, as follows:

will remove the entry foo/tom/junk, all of the files that start
with foo/harry/, and all of the files that end with .o (in any
path). Note that shell pathname expansion has been inhibited
with backslashes, so that zip can see the asterisks, enabling
zip to match on the contents of the zip archive instead of the
contents of the current directory. (The backslashes are not
used on MSDOS-based platforms.) Can also use quotes to escape
the asterisks as in

zip -d foo foo/tom/junk "foo/harry/" ".o"

Not escaping the asterisks on a system where the shell expands
wildcards could result in the asterisks being converted to a
list of files in the current directory and that list used to
delete entries from the archive. Under MSDOS, -d is case
sensitive when it matches names in the zip archive. This
requires that file names be entered in upper case if they were
zipped by PKZIP on an MSDOS system. (We considered making this
case insensitive on systems where paths were case insensitive,
but it is possible the archive came from a system where case
does matter and the archive could include both Bar and bar as
separate files in the archive.) But see the new option -ic to
ignore case in the archive.

How to pass a file that changes name to another command in Bash?

how to specify the unzip target directory

There is no such option, at least not for Info-ZIP. You have to
create a directory named projx in the first place,
move/copy your files into it and then pass it to
zip. Another solution would be to pass option
-d to unzip for specifying the target
directory for extraction.

Trouple unzipping a 4GB .zip file on CentOS 5.5

uncompressing .zip file in linux

unzip data.zip data/file1.txt data/file2.txt data/file3.txt

description

unzip
will list, test, or extract files from a ZIP archive,
commonly found on MS-DOS systems. The default behavior (with
no options) is to extract into the current directory (and
subdirectories below it) all files from the specified ZIP
archive. A companion program, zip(1), creates ZIP
archives; both programs are compatible with archives created
by PKWARE’s PKZIP and PKUNZIP for
MS-DOS, but in many cases the program options or default
behaviors differ.

options

Note that, in
order to support obsolescent hardware, unzip’s
usage screen is limited to 22 or 23 lines and should
therefore be considered only a reminder of the basic
unzip syntax rather than an exhaustive list of all
possible flags. The exhaustive list follows:

-Z

zipinfo(1) mode. If the first option on the
command line is -Z, the remaining options are
taken to be zipinfo(1) options. See the appropriate
manual page for a description of these options.

extract files to stdout/screen
(’’CRT’’). This option is similar to
the -p option except that the name of each file
is printed as it is extracted, the -a option is
allowed, and ASCII-EBCDIC conversion is automatically
performed if appropriate. This option is not listed in the
unzip usage screen.

-f

freshen existing files, i.e., extract only those files
that already exist on disk and that are newer than the disk
copies. By default unzip queries before overwriting,
but the -o option may be used to suppress the
queries. Note that under many operating systems, the TZ
(timezone) environment variable must be set correctly in
order for -f and -u to work
properly (under Unix the variable is usually set
automatically). The reasons for this are somewhat subtle but
have to do with the differences between DOS-format file
times (always local time) and Unix-format times (always in
GMT/UTC) and the necessity to compare the two. A typical TZ
value is ’’PST8PDT’’ (US Pacific
time with automatic adjustment for Daylight Savings Time or
’’summer time’’).

-l

list archive files (short format). The names,
uncompressed file sizes and modification dates and times of
the specified files are printed, along with totals for all
files specified. If UnZip was compiled with OS2_EAS defined,
the -l option also lists columns for the sizes
of stored OS/2 extended attributes (EAs) and OS/2 access
control lists (ACLs). In addition, the zipfile comment and
individual file comments (if any) are displayed. If a file
was archived from a single-case file system (for example,
the old MS-DOS FAT file system) and the -L
option was given, the filename is converted to lowercase and
is prefixed with a caret (^).

-p

extract files to pipe (stdout). Nothing but the file
data is sent to stdout, and the files are always extracted
in binary format, just as they are stored (no
conversions).

-t

test archive files. This option extracts each specified
file in memory and compares the CRC (cyclic redundancy
check, an enhanced checksum) of the expanded file with the
original file’s stored CRC value.

-T

[most OSes] set the timestamp on the archive(s) to that
of the newest file in each one. This corresponds to
zip’s -go option except that it
can be used on wildcard zipfiles (e.g.,
’’unzip -T \*.zip’’)
and is much faster.

-u

update existing files and create new ones if needed.
This option performs the same function as the
-f option, extracting (with query) files that
are newer than those with the same name on disk, and in
addition it extracts those files that do not already exist
on disk. See -f above for information on
setting the timezone properly.

-v

list archive files (verbose format) or show diagnostic
version info. This option has evolved and now behaves as
both an option and a modifier. As an option it has two
purposes: when a zipfile is specified with no other options,
-v lists archive files verbosely, adding to the
basic -l info the compression method,
compressed size, compression ratio and 32-bit CRC. In
contrast to most of the competing utilities, unzip
removes the 12 additional header bytes of encrypted entries
from the compressed size numbers. Therefore, compressed size
and compression ratio figures are independent of the
entry’s encryption status and show the correct
compression performance. (The complete size of the encrypted
compressed data stream for zipfile entries is reported by
the more verbose zipinfo(1) reports, see the separate
manual.) When no zipfile is specified (that is, the complete
command is simply ’’unzip
-v’’), a diagnostic screen is
printed. In addition to the normal header with release date
and version, unzip lists the home Info-ZIP ftp site
and where to find a list of other ftp and non-ftp sites; the
target operating system for which it was compiled, as well
as (possibly) the hardware on which it was compiled, the
compiler and version used, and the compilation date; any
special compilation options that might affect the
program’s operation (see also DECRYPTION
below); and any options stored in environment variables that
might do the same (see ENVIRONMENT OPTIONS below). As
a modifier it works in conjunction with other options (e.g.,
-t) to produce more verbose or debugging
output; this is not yet fully implemented but will be in
future releases.

-z

display only the archive comment.

arguments

file[.zip]

Path of the ZIP archive(s). If the file specification is a
wildcard, each matching file is processed in an order determined
by the operating system (or file system). Only the filename can
be a wildcard; the path itself cannot. Wildcard expressions are
similar to those supported in commonly used Unix shells
(sh, ksh, csh) and may contain:

*

matches a sequence of 0 or more characters

?

matches exactly 1 character

[...]

matches any single character found inside the brackets; ranges
are specified by a beginning character, a hyphen, and an ending
character. If an exclamation point or a caret (’!’ or
’^’) follows the left bracket, then the range of
characters within the brackets is complemented (that is, anything
except the characters inside the brackets is considered a
match). To specify a verbatim left bracket, the three-character
sequence ’’[[]’’ has to be used.

(Be sure to quote any character that might otherwise be
interpreted or modified by the operating system, particularly
under Unix and VMS.) If no matches are found, the specification
is assumed to be a literal filename; and if that also fails, the
suffix .zip is appended. Note that self-extracting ZIP
files are supported, as with any other ZIP archive; just specify
the .exe suffix (if any) explicitly.

[file(s)]

An optional list of archive members to be processed, separated by
spaces. (VMS versions compiled with VMSCLI defined must delimit
files with commas instead. See -v in OPTIONS
below.) Regular expressions (wildcards) may be used to match
multiple members; see above. Again, be sure to quote expressions
that would otherwise be expanded or modified by the operating
system.

[-x xfile(s)]

An optional list of archive members to be excluded from
processing. Since wildcard characters normally match
(’/’) directory separators (for exceptions see the
option -W), this option may be used to exclude any files
that are in subdirectories. For example, ’’unzip
foo *.[ch] -x */*’’ would extract all C source
files in the main directory, but none in any subdirectories.
Without the -x option, all C source files in all
directories within the zipfile would be extracted.

[-d exdir]

An optional directory to which to extract files. By default, all
files and subdirectories are recreated in the current directory;
the -d option allows extraction in an arbitrary directory
(always assuming one has permission to write to the directory).
This option need not appear at the end of the command line; it is
also accepted before the zipfile specification (with the normal
options), immediately after the zipfile specification, or between
the file(s) and the -x option. The option and
directory may be concatenated without any white space between
them, but note that this may cause normal shell behavior to be
suppressed. In particular,
’’-d ~’’ (tilde) is
expanded by Unix C shells into the name of the user’s home
directory, but ’’-d~’’ is
treated as a literal subdirectory
’’~’’ of the current directory.

decryption

Encrypted archives are fully supported by Info-ZIP software, but
due to United States export restrictions, de-/encryption support
might be disabled in your compiled binary. However, since spring
2000, US export restrictions have been liberated, and our source
archives do now include full crypt code. In case you need binary
distributions with crypt support enabled, see the file
’’WHERE’’ in any Info-ZIP source or
binary distribution for locations both inside and outside the US.

Some compiled versions of unzip may not support
decryption. To check a version for crypt support, either attempt
to test or extract an encrypted archive, or else check
unzip’s diagnostic screen (see the -v option
above) for ’’[decryption]’’ as
one of the special compilation options.

As noted above, the -P option may be used to supply a
password on the command line, but at a cost in security. The
preferred decryption method is simply to extract normally; if a
zipfile member is encrypted, unzip will prompt for the
password without echoing what is typed. unzip continues to
use the same password as long as it appears to be valid, by
testing a 12-byte header on each file. The correct password will
always check out against the header, but there is a 1-in-256
chance that an incorrect password will as well. (This is a
security feature of the PKWARE zipfile format; it helps prevent
brute-force attacks that might otherwise gain a large speed
advantage by testing only the header.) In the case that an
incorrect password is given but it passes the header test anyway,
either an incorrect CRC will be generated for the extracted data
or else unzip will fail during the extraction because the
’’decrypted’’ bytes do not constitute a
valid compressed data stream.

If the first password fails the header check on some file,
unzip will prompt for another password, and so on until
all files are extracted. If a password is not known, entering a
null password (that is, just a carriage return or
’’Enter’’) is taken as a signal to skip
all further prompting. Only unencrypted files in the archive(s)
will thereafter be extracted. (In fact, that’s not quite
true; older versions of zip(1) and zipcloak(1)
allowed null passwords, so unzip checks each encrypted
file to see if the null password works. This may result in
’’false positives’’ and extraction
errors, as noted above.)

Archives encrypted with 8-bit passwords (for example, passwords
with accented European characters) may not be portable across
systems and/or other archivers. This problem stems from the use
of multiple encoding methods for such characters, including
Latin-1 (ISO 8859-1) and OEM code page 850. DOS PKZIP
2.04g uses the OEM code page; Windows PKZIP 2.50 uses
Latin-1 (and is therefore incompatible with DOS PKZIP);
Info-ZIP uses the OEM code page on DOS, OS/2 and Win3.x ports but
ISO coding (Latin-1 etc.) everywhere else; and Nico Mak’s
WinZip 6.x does not allow 8-bit passwords at all.
UnZip 5.3 (or newer) attempts to use the default character
set first (e.g., Latin-1), followed by the alternate one (e.g.,
OEM code page) to test passwords. On EBCDIC systems, if both of
these fail, EBCDIC encoding will be tested as a last resort.
(EBCDIC is not tested on non-EBCDIC systems, because there are no
known archivers that encrypt using EBCDIC encoding.) ISO
character encodings other than Latin-1 are not supported. The new
addition of (partially) Unicode (resp. UTF-8) support in
UnZip 6.0 has not yet been adapted to the encryption
password handling in unzip. On systems that use UTF-8 as
native character encoding, unzip simply tries decryption
with the native UTF-8 encoded password; the built-in attempts to
check the password in translated encoding have not yet been
adapted for UTF-8 support and will consequently fail.

diagnostics

The exit status (or error level) approximates the exit codes
defined by PKWARE and takes on the following values, except under
VMS:

0

normal; no errors or warnings detected.

1

one or more warning errors were encountered, but processing
completed successfully anyway. This includes zipfiles where one
or more files was skipped due to unsupported compression method
or encryption with an unknown password.

2

a generic error in the zipfile format was detected. Processing
may have completed successfully anyway; some broken zipfiles
created by other archivers have simple work-arounds.

3

a severe error in the zipfile format was detected. Processing
probably failed immediately.

4

unzip was unable to allocate memory for one or more
buffers during program initialization.

5

unzip was unable to allocate memory or unable to obtain a
tty to read the decryption password(s).

6

unzip was unable to allocate memory during decompression
to disk.

7

unzip was unable to allocate memory during in-memory
decompression.

8

[currently not used]

9

the specified zipfiles were not found.

10

invalid options were specified on the command line.

11

no matching files were found.

50

the disk is (or was) full during extraction.

51

the end of the ZIP archive was encountered prematurely.

80

the user aborted unzip prematurely with control-C (or
similar)

81

testing or extraction of one or more files failed due to
unsupported compression methods or unsupported decryption.

82

no files were found due to bad decryption password(s). (If even
one file is successfully processed, however, the exit status is
1.)

VMS interprets standard Unix (or PC) return values as other,
scarier-looking things, so unzip instead maps them into
VMS-style status codes. The current mapping is as follows: 1
(success) for normal exit, 0x7fff0001 for warning errors, and
(0x7fff000? + 16*normal_unzip_exit_status) for all other errors,
where the ’?’ is 2 (error) for unzip values 2,
9-11 and 80-82, and 4 (fatal error) for the remaining ones (3-8,
50, 51). In addition, there is a compilation option to expand
upon this behavior: defining RETURN_CODES results in a
human-readable explanation of what the error status means.

environment options

unzip’s default behavior may be modified via options
placed in an environment variable. This can be done with any
option, but it is probably most useful with the -a,
-L, -C, -q, -o, or -n
modifiers: make unzip auto-convert text files by default,
make it convert filenames from uppercase systems to lowercase,
make it match names case-insensitively, make it quieter, or make
it always overwrite or never overwrite files as it extracts them.
For example, to make unzip act as quietly as possible,
only reporting errors, one would use one of the following
commands:
Unix Bourne shell:

UNZIP=-qq; export UNZIP

Unix C shell:

setenv UNZIP -qq

OS/2 or MS-DOS:

set UNZIP=-qq

VMS (quotes for lowercase):

define UNZIP_OPTS "-qq"

Environment options are, in effect, considered to be just like
any other command-line options, except that they are effectively
the first options on the command line. To override an environment
option, one may use the ’’minus
operator’’ to remove it. For instance, to override
one of the quiet-flags in the example above, use the command

unzip --q[other options] zipfile

The first hyphen is the normal switch character, and the second
is a minus sign, acting on the q option. Thus the effect here is
to cancel one quantum of quietness. To cancel both quiet flags,
two (or more) minuses may be used:

unzip -t--q zipfile
unzip ---qt zipfile

(the two are equivalent). This may seem awkward or confusing, but
it is reasonably intuitive: just ignore the first hyphen and go
from there. It is also consistent with the behavior of Unix
nice(1).

As suggested by the examples above, the default variable names
are UNZIP_OPTS for VMS (where the symbol used to install
unzip as a foreign command would otherwise be confused
with the environment variable), and UNZIP for all other operating
systems. For compatibility with zip(1), UNZIPOPT is also
accepted (don’t ask). If both UNZIP and UNZIPOPT are
defined, however, UNZIP takes precedence. unzip’s
diagnostic option (-v with no zipfile name) can be used to
check the values of all four possible unzip and
zipinfo environment variables.

The timezone variable (TZ) should be set according to the local
timezone in order for the -f and -u to operate
correctly. See the description of -f above for details.
This variable may also be necessary to get timestamps of
extracted files to be set correctly. The WIN32
(Win9x/ME/NT4/2K/XP/2K3) port of unzip gets the timezone
configuration from the registry, assuming it is correctly set in
the Control Panel. The TZ variable is ignored for this port.

modifiers

-a

convert text files. Ordinarily all files are extracted exactly as
they are stored (as ’’binary’’ files).
The -a option causes files identified by zip as
text files (those with the ’t’ label in
zipinfo listings, rather than ’b’) to be
automatically extracted as such, converting line endings,
end-of-file characters and the character set itself as necessary.
(For example, Unix files use line feeds (LFs) for end-of-line
(EOL) and have no end-of-file (EOF) marker; Macintoshes use
carriage returns (CRs) for EOLs; and most PC operating systems
use CR+LF for EOLs and control-Z for EOF. In addition, IBM
mainframes and the Michigan Terminal System use EBCDIC rather
than the more common ASCII character set, and NT supports
Unicode.) Note that zip’s identification of text
files is by no means perfect; some
’’text’’ files may actually be binary and
vice versa. unzip therefore prints
’’[text]’’ or
’’[binary]’’ as a visual check
for each file it extracts when using the -a option. The
-aa option forces all files to be extracted as text,
regardless of the supposed file type. On VMS, see also -S.

-b

[general] treat all files as binary (no text conversions). This
is a shortcut for ---a.

[VMS] auto-convert binary files (see -a above) to
fixed-length, 512-byte record format. Doubling the option
(-bb) forces all files to be extracted in this format.
When extracting to standard output (-c or -p option
in effect), the default conversion of text record delimiters is
disabled for binary (-b) resp. all (-bb) files.

-B

[when compiled with UNIXBACKUP defined] save a backup copy of
each overwritten file. The backup file is gets the name of the
target file with a tilde and optionally a unique sequence number
(up to 5 digits) appended. The sequence number is applied
whenever another file with the original name plus tilde already
exists. When used together with the "overwrite all" option
-o, numbered backup files are never created. In this case,
all backup files are named as the original file with an appended
tilde, existing backup files are deleted without notice. This
feature works similarly to the default behavior of
emacs(1) in many locations.

Example: the old copy of ’’foo’’
is renamed to ’’foo~’’.

Warning: Users should be aware that the -B option does not
prevent loss of existing data under all circumstances. For
example, when unzip is run in overwrite-all mode, an
existing ’’foo~’’ file is
deleted before unzip attempts to rename
’’foo’’ to
’’foo~’’. When this rename
attempt fails (because of a file locks, insufficient privileges,
or ...), the extraction of
’’foo~’’ gets cancelled, but the
old backup file is already lost. A similar scenario takes place
when the sequence number range for numbered backup files gets
exhausted (99999, or 65535 for 16-bit systems). In this case, the
backup file with the maximum sequence number is deleted and
replaced by the new backup version without notice.

-C

use case-insensitive matching for the selection of archive
entries from the command-line list of extract selection patterns.
unzip’s philosophy is ’’you get what you
ask for’’ (this is also responsible for the
-L/-U change; see the relevant options below).
Because some file systems are fully case-sensitive (notably those
under the Unix operating system) and because both ZIP archives
and unzip itself are portable across platforms,
unzip’s default behavior is to match both wildcard
and literal filenames case-sensitively. That is, specifying
’’makefile’’ on the command line
will only match ’’makefile’’ in
the archive, not ’’Makefile’’ or
’’MAKEFILE’’ (and similarly for wildcard
specifications). Since this does not correspond to the behavior
of many other operating/file systems (for example, OS/2 HPFS,
which preserves mixed case but is not sensitive to it), the
-C option may be used to force all filename matches to be
case-insensitive. In the example above, all three files would
then match ’’makefile’’ (or
’’make*’’, or similar). The
-C option affects file specs in both the normal file list
and the excluded-file list (xlist).

Please note that the -C option does neither affect the
search for the zipfile(s) nor the matching of archive entries to
existing files on the extraction path. On a case-sensitive file
system, unzip will never try to overwrite a file
’’FOO’’ when extracting an entry
’’foo’’!

-D

skip restoration of timestamps for extracted items. Normally,
unzip tries to restore all meta-information for extracted
items that are supplied in the Zip archive (and do not require
privileges or impose a security risk). By specifying -D,
unzip is told to suppress restoration of timestamps for
directories explicitly created from Zip archive entries. This
option only applies to ports that support setting timestamps for
directories (currently ATheOS, BeOS, MacOS, OS/2, Unix, VMS,
Win32, for other unzip ports, -D has no effect).
The duplicated option -DD forces suppression of timestamp
restoration for all extracted entries (files and directories).
This option results in setting the timestamps for all extracted
entries to the current time.

On VMS, the default setting for this option is -D for
consistency with the behaviour of BACKUP: file timestamps are
restored, timestamps of extracted directories are left at the
current time. To enable restoration of directory timestamps, the
negated option --D should be specified. On VMS, the option
-D disables timestamp restoration for all extracted Zip
archive items. (Here, a single -D on the command line
combines with the default -D to do what an explicit
-DD does on other systems.)

[non-Acorn systems supporting long filenames with embedded
commas, and only if compiled with ACORN_FTYPE_NFS defined]
translate filetype information from ACORN RISC OS extra field
blocks into a NFS filetype extension and append it to the names
of the extracted files. (When the stored filename appears to
already have an appended NFS filetype extension, it is replaced
by the info from the extra field.)

-i

[MacOS only] ignore filenames stored in MacOS extra fields.
Instead, the most compatible filename stored in the generic part
of the entry’s header is used.

-j

junk paths. The archive’s directory structure is not
recreated; all files are deposited in the extraction directory
(by default, the current one).

convert to lowercase any filename originating on an
uppercase-only operating system or file system. (This was
unzip’s default behavior in releases prior to 5.11;
the new default behavior is identical to the old behavior with
the -U option, which is now obsolete and will be removed
in a future release.) Depending on the archiver, files archived
under single-case file systems (VMS, old MS-DOS FAT, etc.) may be
stored as all-uppercase names; this can be ugly or inconvenient
when extracting to a case-preserving file system such as OS/2
HPFS or a case-sensitive one such as under Unix. By default
unzip lists and extracts such filenames exactly as
they’re stored (excepting truncation, conversion of
unsupported characters, etc.); this option causes the names of
all files from certain systems to be converted to lowercase. The
-LL option forces conversion of every filename to
lowercase, regardless of the originating file system.

-M

pipe all output through an internal pager similar to the Unix
more(1) command. At the end of a screenful of output,
unzip pauses with a ’’--More--’’
prompt; the next screenful may be viewed by pressing the Enter
(Return) key or the space bar. unzip can be terminated by
pressing the ’’q’’ key and, on some
systems, the Enter/Return key. Unlike Unix more(1), there
is no forward-searching or editing capability. Also, unzip
doesn’t notice if long lines wrap at the edge of the
screen, effectively resulting in the printing of two or more
lines and the likelihood that some text will scroll off the top
of the screen before being viewed. On some systems the number of
available lines on the screen is not detected, in which case
unzip assumes the height is 24 lines.

-n

never overwrite existing files. If a file already exists, skip
the extraction of that file without prompting. By default
unzip queries before extracting any file that already
exists; the user may choose to overwrite only the current file,
overwrite all files, skip extraction of the current file, skip
extraction of all existing files, or rename the current file.

-N

[Amiga] extract file comments as Amiga filenotes. File comments
are created with the -c option of zip(1), or with the -N
option of the Amiga port of zip(1), which stores filenotes
as comments.

-o

overwrite existing files without prompting. This is a dangerous
option, so use it with care. (It is often used with -f,
however, and is the only way to overwrite directory EAs under
OS/2.)

-P password

use password to decrypt encrypted zipfile entries (if
any). THIS IS INSECURE! Many multi-user operating systems
provide ways for any user to see the current command line of any
other user; even on stand-alone systems there is always the
threat of over-the-shoulder peeking. Storing the plaintext
password as part of a command line in an automated script is even
worse. Whenever possible, use the non-echoing, interactive prompt
to enter passwords. (And where security is truly important, use
strong encryption such as Pretty Good Privacy instead of the
relatively weak encryption provided by standard zipfile
utilities.)

-q

perform operations quietly (-qq = even quieter).
Ordinarily unzip prints the names of the files it’s
extracting or testing, the extraction methods, any file or
zipfile comments that may be stored in the archive, and possibly
a summary when finished with each archive. The
-q[q] options suppress the printing of some or all
of these messages.

-s

[OS/2, NT, MS-DOS] convert spaces in filenames to underscores.
Since all PC operating systems allow spaces in filenames,
unzip by default extracts filenames with spaces intact
(e.g.,
’’EA DATA. SF’’). This
can be awkward, however, since MS-DOS in particular does not
gracefully support spaces in filenames. Conversion of spaces to
underscores can eliminate the awkwardness in some cases.

-S

[VMS] convert text files (-a, -aa) into Stream_LF
record format, instead of the text-file default, variable-length
record format. (Stream_LF is the default record format of VMS
unzip. It is applied unless conversion (-a,
-aa and/or -b, -bb) is requested or a
VMS-specific entry is processed.)

-U

[UNICODE_SUPPORT only] modify or disable UTF-8 handling. When
UNICODE_SUPPORT is available, the option -U forces
unzip to escape all non-ASCII characters from UTF-8 coded
filenames as ’’#Uxxxx’’ (for UCS-2
characters, or ’’#Lxxxxxx’’ for unicode
codepoints needing 3 octets). This option is mainly provided for
debugging purpose when the fairly new UTF-8 support is suspected
to mangle up extracted filenames.

The option -UU allows to entirely disable the recognition
of UTF-8 encoded filenames. The handling of filename codings
within unzip falls back to the behaviour of previous
versions.

retain (VMS) file version numbers. VMS files can be stored with a
version number, in the format file.ext;##. By default
the ’’;##’’ version numbers are
stripped, but this option allows them to be retained. (On file
systems that limit filenames to particularly short lengths, the
version numbers may be truncated or stripped regardless of this
option.)

-W

[only when WILD_STOP_AT_DIR compile-time option enabled] modifies
the pattern matching routine so that both ’?’
(single-char wildcard) and ’*’ (multi-char wildcard)
do not match the directory separator character ’/’.
(The two-character sequence ’’**’’ acts
as a multi-char wildcard that includes the directory separator in
its matched characters.) Examples:

"*.c" matches "foo.c" but not "mydir/foo.c"
"**.c" matches both "foo.c" and "mydir/foo.c"
"*/*.c" matches "bar/foo.c" but not "baz/bar/foo.c"
"??*/*" matches "ab/foo" and "abc/foo"
but not "a/foo" or "a/b/foo"

This modified behaviour is equivalent to the pattern matching
style used by the shells of some of UnZip’s supported
target OSs (one example is Acorn RISC OS). This option may not be
available on systems where the Zip archive’s internal
directory separator character ’/’ is allowed as
regular character in native operating system filenames.
(Currently, UnZip uses the same pattern matching rules for both
wildcard zipfile specifications and zip entry selection patterns
in most ports. For systems allowing ’/’ as regular
filename character, the -W option would not work as expected on a
wildcard zipfile specification.)

-X

[VMS, Unix, OS/2, NT, Tandem] restore owner/protection info (UICs
and ACL entries) under VMS, or user and group info (UID/GID)
under Unix, or access control lists (ACLs) under certain
network-enabled versions of OS/2 (Warp Server with IBM LAN
Server/Requester 3.0 to 5.0; Warp Connect with IBM Peer 1.0), or
security ACLs under Windows NT. In most cases this will require
special system privileges, and doubling the option (-XX)
under NT instructs unzip to use privileges for extraction;
but under Unix, for example, a user who belongs to several groups
can restore files owned by any of those groups, as long as the
user IDs match his or her own. Note that ordinary file attributes
are always restored--this option applies only to optional, extra
ownership info available on some operating systems. [NT’s
access control lists do not appear to be especially compatible
with OS/2’s, so no attempt is made at cross-platform
portability of access privileges. It is not clear under what
conditions this would ever be useful anyway.]

-Y

[VMS] treat archived file name endings of
’’.nnn’’ (where
’’nnn’’ is a decimal number) as if they
were VMS version numbers (’’;nnn’’). (The
default is to treat them as file types.) Example:

"a.b.3" -> "a.b;3".

-$

[MS-DOS, OS/2, NT] restore the volume label if the extraction
medium is removable (e.g., a diskette). Doubling the option
(-$$) allows fixed media (hard disks) to be labelled as
well. By default, volume labels are ignored.

-/ extensions

[Acorn only] overrides the extension list supplied by Unzip$Ext
environment variable. During extraction, filename extensions that
match one of the items in this extension list are swapped in
front of the base name of the extracted file.

-:

[all but Acorn, VM/CMS, MVS, Tandem] allows to extract archive
members into locations outside of the current ’’
extraction root folder’’. For security reasons,
unzip normally removes ’’parent
dir’’ path components
(’’../’’) from the names of extracted
file. This safety feature (new for version 5.50) prevents
unzip from accidentally writing files to
’’sensitive’’ areas outside the active
extraction folder tree head. The -: option lets
unzip switch back to its previous, more liberal behaviour,
to allow exact extraction of (older) archives that used
’’../’’ components to create multiple
directory trees at the level of the current extraction folder.
This option does not enable writing explicitly to the root
directory (’’/’’). To achieve this, it is
necessary to set the extraction target folder to root (e.g. -d
/ ). However, when the -: option is specified, it is
still possible to implicitly write to the root directory by
specifying enough ’’../’’ path components
within the zip archive. Use this option with extreme caution.

-^

[Unix only] allow control characters in names of extracted ZIP
archive entries. On Unix, a file name may contain any (8-bit)
character code with the two exception ’/’ (directory
delimiter) and NUL (0x00, the C string termination indicator),
unless the specific file system has more restrictive conventions.
Generally, this allows to embed ASCII control characters (or even
sophisticated control sequences) in file names, at least on
’native’ Unix file systems. However, it may be highly
suspicious to make use of this Unix "feature". Embedded control
characters in file names might have nasty side effects when
displayed on screen by some listing code without sufficient
filtering. And, for ordinary users, it may be difficult to handle
such file names (e.g. when trying to specify it for open, copy,
move, or delete operations). Therefore, unzip applies a
filter by default that removes potentially dangerous control
characters from the extracted file names. The -^ option
allows to override this filter in the rare case that embedded
filename control characters are to be intentionally restored.

-2

[VMS] force unconditionally conversion of file names to
ODS2-compatible names. The default is to exploit the destination
file system, preserving case and extended file name characters on
an ODS5 destination file system; and applying the
ODS2-compatibility file name filtering on an ODS2 destination
file system.

tips

The current maintainer, being a lazy sort, finds it very useful
to define a pair of aliases: tt for
’’unzip -tq’’ and ii
for ’’unzip -Z’’ (or
’’zipinfo’’). One may then
simply type ’’tt zipfile’’ to
test an archive, something that is worth making a habit of doing.
With luck unzip will report ’’No errors
detected in compressed data of zipfile.zip,’’
after which one may breathe a sigh of relief.

The maintainer also finds it useful to set the UNZIP environment
variable to ’’-aL’’ and is
tempted to add ’’-C’’ as well.
His ZIPINFO variable is set to
’’-z’’.

url

The Info-ZIP home page is currently at

http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/

or
ftp://ftp.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/ .

versions

v1.2 15 Mar 89

Samuel H. Smith

v2.0 9 Sep 89

Samuel H. Smith

v2.x fall 1989

many Usenet contributors

v3.0 1 May 90

Info-ZIP (DPK, consolidator)

v3.1 15 Aug 90

Info-ZIP (DPK, consolidator)

v4.0 1 Dec 90

Info-ZIP (GRR, maintainer)

v4.1 12 May 91

Info-ZIP

v4.2 20 Mar 92

Info-ZIP (Zip-Bugs subgroup, GRR)

v5.0 21 Aug 92

Info-ZIP (Zip-Bugs subgroup, GRR)

v5.01 15 Jan 93

Info-ZIP (Zip-Bugs subgroup, GRR)

v5.1 7 Feb 94

Info-ZIP (Zip-Bugs subgroup, GRR)

v5.11 2 Aug 94

Info-ZIP (Zip-Bugs subgroup, GRR)

v5.12 28 Aug 94

Info-ZIP (Zip-Bugs subgroup, GRR)

v5.2 30 Apr 96

Info-ZIP (Zip-Bugs subgroup, GRR)

v5.3 22 Apr 97

Info-ZIP (Zip-Bugs subgroup, GRR)

v5.31 31 May 97

Info-ZIP (Zip-Bugs subgroup, GRR)

v5.32 3 Nov 97

Info-ZIP (Zip-Bugs subgroup, GRR)

v5.4 28 Nov 98

Info-ZIP (Zip-Bugs subgroup, SPC)

v5.41 16 Apr 00

Info-ZIP (Zip-Bugs subgroup, SPC)

v5.42 14 Jan 01

Info-ZIP (Zip-Bugs subgroup, SPC)

v5.5 17 Feb 02

Info-ZIP (Zip-Bugs subgroup, SPC)

v5.51 22 May 04

Info-ZIP (Zip-Bugs subgroup, SPC)

v5.52 28 Feb 05

Info-ZIP (Zip-Bugs subgroup, SPC)

v6.0 20 Apr 09

Info-ZIP (Zip-Bugs subgroup, SPC)

bugs

Multi-part
archives are not yet supported, except in conjunction with
zip. (All parts must be concatenated together in
order, and then ’’zip
-F’’ (for zip 2.x) or
’’zip -FF’’ (for
zip 3.x) must be performed on the concatenated
archive in order to ’’fix’’ it.
Also, zip 3.0 and later can combine multi-part
(split) archives into a combined single-file archive using
’’zip -s- inarchive -O
outarchive’’. See the zip 3 manual
page for more information.) This will definitely be
corrected in the next major release.

Archives read
from standard input are not yet supported, except with
funzip (and then only the first member of the archive
can be extracted).

Archives
encrypted with 8-bit passwords (e.g., passwords with
accented European characters) may not be portable across
systems and/or other archivers. See the discussion in
DECRYPTION above.

unzip’s
-M (’’more’’) option
tries to take into account automatic wrapping of long lines.
However, the code may fail to detect the correct wrapping
locations. First, TAB characters (and similar control
sequences) are not taken into account, they are handled as
ordinary printable characters. Second, depending on the
actual system / OS port, unzip may not detect the
true screen geometry but rather rely on "commonly
used" default dimensions. The correct handling of tabs
would require the implementation of a query for the actual
tabulator setup on the output console.

Dates, times
and permissions of stored directories are not restored
except under Unix. (On Windows NT and successors, timestamps
are now restored.)

[MS-DOS] When
extracting or testing files from an archive on a defective
floppy diskette, if the ’’Fail’’
option is chosen from DOS’s ’’Abort,
Retry, Fail?’’ message, older versions of
unzip may hang the system, requiring a reboot. This
problem appears to be fixed, but control-C (or
control-Break) can still be used to terminate
unzip.

Under DEC
Ultrix, unzip would sometimes fail on long zipfiles
(bad CRC, not always reproducible). This was apparently due
either to a hardware bug (cache memory) or an operating
system bug (improper handling of page faults?). Since Ultrix
has been abandoned in favor of Digital Unix (OSF/1), this
may not be an issue anymore.

[Unix] Unix
special files such as FIFO buffers (named pipes), block
devices and character devices are not restored even if they
are somehow represented in the zipfile, nor are hard-linked
files relinked. Basically the only file types restored by
unzip are regular files, directories and symbolic
(soft) links.

[OS/2] Extended
attributes for existing directories are only updated if the
-o (’’overwrite all’’)
option is given. This is a limitation of the operating
system; because directories only have a creation time
associated with them, unzip has no way to determine
whether the stored attributes are newer or older than those
on disk. In practice this may mean a two-pass approach is
required: first unpack the archive normally (with or without
freshening/updating existing files), then overwrite just the
directory entries (e.g., ’’unzip -o foo
*/’’).

[VMS] When
extracting to another directory, only the [.foo]
syntax is accepted for the -d option; the
simple Unix foo syntax is silently ignored (as is the
less common VMS foo.dir syntax).

[VMS] When the
file being extracted already exists, unzip’s
query only allows skipping, overwriting or renaming; there
should additionally be a choice for creating a new version
of the file. In fact, the
’’overwrite’’ choice does create a
new version; the old version is not overwritten or
deleted.

The following
people were former members of the Info-ZIP development group
and provided major contributions to key parts of the current
code: Greg ’’Cave Newt’’ Roelofs
(UnZip, unshrink decompression); Jean-loup Gailly (deflate
compression); Mark Adler (inflate decompression,
fUnZip).

The author of
the original unzip code upon which Info-ZIP’s was
based is Samuel H. Smith; Carl Mascott did the first Unix
port; and David P. Kirschbaum organized and led Info-ZIP in
its early days with Keith Petersen hosting the original
mailing list at WSMR-SimTel20. The full list of contributors
to UnZip has grown quite large; please refer to the CONTRIBS
file in the UnZip source distribution for a relatively
complete version.

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